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Academic Publishing - Who's who and does it really matter
I have a student who asked me the following, "My SSHRC proposal requires that I use what is known as a "Tier 1 Journal" when reading/writing. Is this sufficient for my work within Assignment #1?"
I got to thinking about the politics and the struggle to publish where, with whom, and how. I attempted to look up what the Googlesphere had to say about 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tier journals and I found a great variety of conflicting conversations. There are those that discuss issues of tenure while others quite blatantly indicate that tier 1 is the only world while others seem rather ambivalent to the whole process.
I understand that there are many reasons for choosing to attempt to get published in a particular journal but I really struggle when it comes to advising students. My struggle has little to do with assignments in a course and more to do with the overall message and how we can push a larger conversation about value in the world of academic publishing.
I think the same conversations surfaces when it comes to conferences. I know that some feel that certain conferences have greater value or prestige than others and this seems, at times to contribute to the class structure in the world of conferences. Again, however I think there needs to be a message to our students about the greater worth and value of many different publications and conferences.
Maybe there needs to be a journeyman approach to this and part of the apprenticeship is publication tied to an understanding of where and value, based upon different factors. I gather that IRRODL and other open journals seem to struggle against the big closed journal money folks so how can we assist our students in seeing what is what in this business?
Comments
It is a strange thing indeed! I think this elitist and self-congratulatory model is in its death throes and will diminish in significance in all fields, perhaps starting with the more vague and undefined areas of study (like learning technology and distance ed) and moving in to the central bastion fields and disciplines over time.
I mentioned in a recent blog post that there appears to be a different process emerging in which we consider the peer review of surrounding dialogue to be part of the publication itslef: the dialogue becomes the thing that provides validity, not to mention the means for social construction of knowledge about the topic. Terry's reply to your post, Stuart, is a great example of this: an interesting and thought provoking post has gained further richness and validity when we view the entire dialogue, not only your post, as a single entity.
Mediawiki (the tool behind Wikipedia) and similar tools (including the Landing's own Pages tool and Moodle's wiki) harden this process to become part of the tool itself, but it is implicit in the model of most blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, file sharing and many uses of discussion tools. Great bloggers tend to attract more comments and, more often than not, those comments greatly extend the original posts to provide subtler and richer insights, not to mention critiques and supporting evidence etc. Because of the benefits of many eyes and many minds, soft peer review of this nature is more rigorous, more accountable, more knowledge-rich and more beneficial than any traditional 'expert' review can be.
There are problems sorting the wheat from the chaff, especially when there are hundreds or thousands of associated comments (as is the case for some very popular bloggers) but that's a soluble problem: a simple-ish matter of recursion in which the same soft peer review that extends the original post is also applied to the 'reviews' themselves. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Slashdot is (IMHO) the most powerful and effective exponent of this technique though it is too geeky to work for most people. Something to work on for this site, I think!
Thank you Terry and Jon for adding to this discussion. I went and read your referenced posting Jon and I note a comment about the cream rising to the top and I wonder about something like Google's Ngram tool. I saw this in an interesting TedTalk entitled "What we learned from 5 million books". Could these types of tools be used to help sort out who is doing what and when? I see value, particularly with respect to the long term use of archived material in places such as the Landing.
Absolutely! These are good examples of collective intelligence or, more simply, a collective. We are having tools written for the Landing (research-led) that can in principle provide filtering and recommendation along these lines. Right now they are aimed at recommending people and posts, but the engine is designed to work with everything on the Landing so will in principle be able to work with the whole site. Should see the results of this when we upgrade to the next major version of Elgg as they are being designed to work with that system and are not compatible with the current site.
Hi,
I have a strong doubt about peer-review process of certain conferences - how do you think if reviewers who don't hold a master review research proposals submitted by PhD researchers, for example...? I understand that conferences are for diverse people and it's good as it is but I still think this is not a very fair process. To be a reviewer, I believe some sort of screening shall be made in order to keep the quality of reviewing. "Blind peer-review" is not enough to assure quality.
Terumi
Interesting point Terumi but raises the same question and the same problem: who are the gatekeepers who make that decision?
Peer reputation is a social construct in which a person's roles, interests and recognised competences within a peer community determine eligibility and rank. A PhD is a miniscule part of a body of evidence: the revewers' contributions to the field weigh far more heavily than their formal qualifications. To become a reviewer means that you are judged by your peers to have made enough of a contribution to be capable of recognising expertise of others in the area.
It's absolutely not about certificates. Even if it were, a PhD is examined through a highly fallible peer review process and, worse still, one that may have taken place a long time ago and that does not imply generalisable or current competence. A PhD (hopefully) demonstrates that its holder once had a minimal level of competence in a particular and often quite limited subset of reasearch methods and practices at the time it was attempted, but no more than that. More importantly, the absence of a PhD does not prove a lack of competence.
Wittgenstein wrote what was, at the time and perhaps to this day, by far the most important philosophical work of the 20th century yet he had no PhD*. Similarly, Einstein had no doctorate when he did most of the work for which he is most famous. Conversely, I know many people with PhDs whose judgment as peer reviewers I would not (and do not) respect at all. And there are many more whose opinions I would respect in their own field of expertise but not in my own!
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* This was, incidentally, an omission that was corrected so that Wittgenstein could teach at Cambridge, by treating the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as his thesis, on which he was very informally examined by two other giants of 20th century phiilosophy, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. For lovers of philosophy, there is a gently humorous recreation of the event at http://www.sfu.ca/~jeffpell/Phil467/WittViva.pdf in which Moore delightfuly (and perhaps rightly) concludes that the Tractatus Logicus is not up to the standard required for a Cambridge doctorate.
Hi Jon,
Thank you for the sharing - I understand your points. I just think all people w/o PhD are not Einstein (I know that's not what you mean). And I remember reading somewhere that at his PhD defense, Wittgenstein said to his dissertation evaluation committee members that it's beyond their reach to understand. Just I do not like the online auto-registering system of reviewers that I see more often these days and am wondering if there are any gatekeepers in the whole process!
Terumi